Saturday, 24 March 2012

A few nice reviews of Glitch Tank have cropped up around the place. Here's one from Edge Online. It hasn't really sold much, but I'm not too bothered about that after the Indie Royale bundle last week! I am a little discouraged from polishing off the other two-player prototypes I have lying around though; working on something single-player for now instead.

This review from Game Side Story (a French website) finished with (via Google translate): "Finally, the only downside seems to be the variety of the game in the long run. If the first parts are greatly different from each other by the gradual mastery of the game system, they operate less and less over time. If this result is common to many strategy games, it would be here to offer some significant changes and additions on the modes and available actions. A lever easy to create diversity, particularly around the main theme, the glitch."
I figured this was a challenge I was up to, so I've added some rare stuff to provide more long-term variety. Most of the time it's the same as before, but occasionally something will glitch out randomly.

I've also added a new mode where your tanks take 6 hits to kill instead of 3. I'd recommend not playing this mode until you're used to the game - when you first play it's quite hard to do any damage at all so this will take forever, but once you get more used to the controls you can get in 3 hits extremely quickly so this option makes for a longer, more strategic game. It can still be very fast and brutal though! (Some of the new glitches tend to make the game more random as well; this counteracts that effect somewhat.)

It's also on iPhone now. There was a problem with sound not playing before, which is why I released on just iPad (plus that was all I had to test on), but now I've picked up an iPod touch and optimised my audio code a bit and it seems to be working fine.

If you have an iThing and a friend you should get this game.app store link

They asked if I had any bonus content that could be included. Nothing immediately came to mind, but with my head full of game jams I said "tell you what, I'll do a remix for it". So I came up with Vertex Vortex Cortex Remix. It reuses code and aesthetics from Vertex Dispenser, but it behaves completely differently. It's a "figure it out as you go" puzzle/experience/thing in the vein of Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J and The Sense of Connectedness.

Have a screenshot:

I've also thrown in a level that was cut from the Vertex Dispenser campaign: Boss Fight. It was going to be the final level, so it's fairly hard. Inappropriately hard, in fact - if it had stayed I'd have certainly had to drop the difficulty. I only recommend it if you've completed the campaign and really want an extra challenge.